


As Red As the Blood on My Hands

by nekare



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: apocalyptothon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-20
Updated: 2011-04-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekare/pseuds/nekare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam goes evil and Dean can't bring himself to stop him until after it's all over and it's just the two of them left in a world that's getting sucked straight into Hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Red As the Blood on My Hands

Sometimes, Dean tries to remember what it felt like to talk to other people – to flirt, to lie, to impress – but it’s been so long that it’s hard to imagine a time when the sky was still visible and the smell of decomposing human flesh wasn’t an everyday thing.

Sometimes, he still wakes up and hopes it was all a bad dream, but then reality kicks in, and then he wishes he was still asleep.

\----

The scariest part is that it isn’t a sudden thing; that he doesn’t wake up one day to find that his brother has become a monster overnight. It actually is such a slow process that Dean doesn’t acknowledge it until he’s standing over the corpse of a young girl and Sam is taking one of his blood-coated fingers to his mouth, making noises of delight as if he was a connoisseur tasting a rather extraordinary sip of wine.

(It starts with a certain look in Sam’s eyes, a certain morbid interest in the suffering of the victims they interview, a certain new-found nastiness in the way he hunts.)

Dean points his gun at Sam’s face, hand trembling slightly, but Sam only laughs. It’s his usual laugh, bright and open, and he puts his hands in his pockets and hunches a little just like he always does. The effect is ruined by the bloodstains that his hands leave on his jeans, though, and it’s only that that keeps Dean from wavering. The old warehouse to which Dean followed Sam on a hunch is falling apart, and the only parts where the thick layer of dust has been disturbed tell a story of a girl struggling against her killer.

“Really cute, Dean,” Sam says, still smiling. “Like you’re really going to shoot.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Dean says, voice thick, and he’s not sure he believes his own words. Sam once made him promise, yes, but Dean’s never been good at keeping those.

This time, when Sam laughs, it sounds a little less like him and a lot more like the things they’ve been hunting their entire lives. Sam steps over the girl’s broken body to get closer to him, and the gesture makes Dean shudder. Sam moves Dean’s arm away with ease, Dean letting him because he doesn’t want to believe any of this is real.

“Come on, Dean, you wouldn’t shoot your own brother, would you?” Sam says in a softer tone, inquisitive. “Not the brother you used to pick up from school and mock for being a geek, not the one whose ass you save on a daily basis.”

Sam steps closer, until they’re almost nose to nose, and somehow Dean can’t move from the spot, can’t edge backwards like he really wants. Sam’s fingers find Dean’s hand, hanging limp against his side, and they open his fingers one by one until the gun falls to the floor with a metallic noise that echoes across the room.

Sam tilts his head, almost childishly, and with a soft smile he says, “No, Dean, you wouldn’t kill me. You _couldn’t_.”

Something about his tone finally makes Dean snap, and he takes a step back, clenches his jaw, and punches Sam right in the face. Sam looks surprised for a moment, but then he’s hitting Dean back, and _shit_ but it hurts -- he can add enhanced-strength to the list of Sam’s powers.

They fight. It’s nasty and dirty and vicious; they’d never really wanted to hurt each other for real before, but every time Dean gets a glimpse of the girl’s unseeing eyes he hits harder. Sam somehow ends up holding the gun, and Dean can feel his blood boil as Sam makes him kneel on the dusty floor in front of him. They’re both panting, sweaty and bloody, and for a couple of minutes all that can be heard in the room is their breathing. Dean has a cut above his eyebrow and the blood trickles into his eye, making it difficult for him to see.

“You’re not him,” he says, and he hates how weak he sounds.

Sam laughs, head thrown back. “Oh, believe it, big brother, it _is_ me. This is just me giving in.”

“Giving in to what?”

“To everything, it seems.” Sam shrugs. “So sorry for shattering your hopes, Dean,” he says, and then everything goes black when Sam hits him in the head with the butt of the gun.

When he wakes up, the only company he’s got is a cooling body, and Sam is nowhere to be seen. He buries the girl in silence, sick to his stomach, and then in silence too he kicks moldy pieces of wood and boxes and everything else he can find in the warehouse until he’s too tired and he aches too much to do anything else but crawl into the Impala’s backseat and blame himself for everything because that’s what he always does, what he’s always done.

He doesn’t speak for two days because the _how could you_ is still stuck somewhere in his throat.

\----

Looking for Sam becomes easy, he just has to open the paper and look at the headlines.

Going after him isn’t as easy, though, because he’s always a few moments late, and all he finds are charred bodies and flaming buildings.

It is slowly driving Dean crazy, spending months on end going after the ghost of what his brother had once been and only finding death in his wake. He’s drinking far more than ever before, but he thinks the situation rather calls for it, if he has to be honest. He still calls Sam twice a day, and everyday he gets voicemail. He’s not quite sure why he does it, he’s aware that Sam has gone too far to get back, but he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t at least try, after he had been the one to practically sic Sam free on the world out of selfishness.

The news talks of freak accidents and gruesome murders with confused expressions on their faces, and Dean’s been a hunter long enough to be able to read between the lines and know that Sam has been getting support from the nasty creatures he used to kill. It looks as if he’s building an army, but for what purpose, Dean can’t even begin to fathom – the demon that killed their mother has been dead for four years already, and aside from their little hanky-panky trip to hell to release Dean from his contract, they hadn’t been in the presence of such level of evil since.

So he worries, and hates himself for his weakness and chases Sam from town to town and from crime scene to crime scene in the hopes he’ll be able to set something right this time around.

\----

Dean wakes up when he feels a weight settle on his bed, and the presence is so familiar that he doesn’t even try to move for the knife under his pillow. He feels tired, lethargic, so he doesn’t open his eyes and instead basks in the proximity.

“We came here once with Dad, you remember?” Comes Sam’s voice at his right, and he nods. That’s the reason he chose this town, and the last one, and the one before.

“A circus, right?” says Dean, but it comes out muddled, clumsy, and it’s like his tongue can’t seem to form the rest of the words he wants to say. There was a circus that time, and little Sammy cried every time a clown came near him, and their father got him to ride the elephant to make it up to him. Sam had loved it, even when its trunk kept prodding him. Even the memory is dreamlike now with Sam here, and the moment feels heady, as if it was just about to slip from Dean’s grasp.

“Ah, the happy memories,” Sam says with a sigh. “Too bad they’re not enough to make up for the bad ones.” Sam pats Dean’s shoulder, patronizingly, and Dean has to frown. His head is swimming, and he’s starting to realize something isn’t right.

Sam goes on, and it almost sounds as if he is talking to himself. “Really, though, I never pegged you for the sentimental kind, I thought you were above such bullshit, but going to all of the important places of our childhood is so very trite of you, Dean.”

Dean finally forces himself to open his eyes, only to find Sam grinning at him. He tries to move but his body doesn’t respond, his limbs heavy. He panics, but Sam doesn’t seem to notice. “I know you’re trying to track me, and I’m here to tell you to get off my back.” He sounds vaguely annoyed, like Dean’s only a bothersome fly that refuses to go away. “You’ll see me when you’re meant to, so stop chasing after me already.”

He finally looks down into Dean’s eyes, and he smiles even wider. “Oh yeah, I drugged you, by the way. You won’t be able to move for a couple of hours. It’s for your own good, really,” he adds when he sees Dean’s expression, and try as he may Dean can’t seem to be able to yell what’s on his mind.

Sam pats his shoulder again before getting close enough to whisper in Dean’s ear. “See you when the skies die,” he says, and stands up. He crosses the salt line on his way out of the room like there’s nothing there at all, and it makes everything suddenly seem too real, too final.

Dean spends two hours lying on the bed, immobile, while he listens to Sam massacring the rest of motel’s inhabitants. When the screaming finally dies, he knows Sam is gone.

\----

It’s as if Sam’s disappearance triggers something in the world, some kind of air-born toxin that makes the world go mad. Every day there are reports of mass suicides and people poisoning their children to ‘save’ them from something even they can’t name and people walk the streets with glassy eyes singing how the end is nigh.

No one seems to be able to explain it, the way human kind has grown so vicious overnight.

Sam seems to be bent on destroying the world, and by now, Dean worries that he might be able to do it.

\----

The sky darkens in September, and people stand on their doorways to stare at the dark orange hue the clouds have turned. It looks ominous, as if a storm is approaching, but other than the lightning that can be seen all day long, not a drop falls. It gets darker as the week advances, and soon, the world looks washed-off, like an old black and white film that is painted in the gray scale. It happens everywhere, all over at once, and there are reports on the news about lighting striking schools in Egypt and apartment buildings in Bolivia and the same in another hundred countries.

Dean stares at the sky through the Impala’s windows, and the way there’s hardly any patch of sky visible, masses of clouds covering the sunlight almost entirely, sits wrong with him in the pit of his stomach in the same way a ghost or a poltergeist or a demon always has. He could swear he can see flashes of scaled tails and claws right before he blinks, but in the time it takes him to open his eyes again it’s all gone, not a trace left. That doesn’t mean it’s not _there_ , though, and Dean has the impression that the world is falling apart at the seams.

He watches the clouds becoming bright white for a second, and by the time he can hear the thunder, he understands the meaning of the cryptic words Sam said the last time they saw each other.

\----

Dean finally catches up to Sam next to a small lake near the Canadian border, and he watches Sam’s back for a while as Sam stands next to the shore, eyes set on the horizon. The thunder is so loud that it’s almost deafening, has been that way for days already, but Sam doesn’t react at all, not a cringe or a jump or anything that would look remotely human.

The gun tucked in Dean’s waistband is cold, and the knowledge that it’s there and that he’s about to use it make him even colder still. Sam’s not doing anything, though, and he’ll be damned if he shoots his brother in the back. So he waits.

After a while, Sam finally turns around to face him, but he doesn’t move closer. “You know,” he says, not in the least surprised to see Dean, “it really is ironic that I was the one who liked people, while you were the one that liked our miserably lonely life.”

“Ironic why?” Dean asks, not able to reign in his curiosity.

Sam grins, and it sends chills down Dean’s spine. “Because I’m about to make your wish come true.”

He turns around again and walks into the water, the fabric of his pants getting darker as it grows damp. Sam leaves no waves in his wake, the water perfectly still except for the places where it touches him, and it just looks downright eerie. The lake’s water is clear, just a hint of green tint to it, and Dean can see little orange fish swimming away from Sam’s feet, as if avoiding touching him.

“Wait, what do you mean?” Dean calls after Sam, and goes to stand on the edge himself, although he doesn’t enter the water.

Sam faces him, still grinning. “I’m sure you’ve heard of my little project of mass destruction by now,” he says, matter-of-factly. Dean sets his jaw, curls his hands into fists, but Sam ignores him and continues. “Well, it’s just going a bit too slowly for my taste,” he says, and then he touches his index finger to the water’s surface.

Blackness bleeds from it, and it slowly spreads like a stain over the water as Sam just stands there in the middle, the tide of darkness covering the entire lake in moments, as far as Dean can see. The water laps at the shore right next to Dean’s feet, and he takes a step back, not bothering to hide his fear. Sam laughs as the fish die and float to the surface, as the trees whose roots go into the water wither and die, as the birds fall dead onto the ground. It finally starts to rain, and when it falls, the water is the color of tar.

Two days later the worldwide population is dead and rotting, and Dean is left alive with humanity’s murderer for company.

\----

He stays on his own for a few days after the world ends, going from city to city, desperately, in search of survivors. All he finds are bodies lying on the floor where the first wave of people had died the minute the rain had touched them. The rest of the corpses are thrown haphazardly on the hospital’s floors: the few people that had lived through the rain only to die from water poisoning a day after. Dean wanders the halls of Michigan’s Children’s Hospital with a hand waving the flashlight and the other one covering his mouth to keep himself from puking. The kids on the beds look almost peaceful, eyes closed, and the only indication that something happened is the trickle of blood from the noses that made a puddle on their pillows. It looks brown and crusty by now.

The people that died outside weren’t so lucky. Every drop that fell on them left a gaping would, deep and bloody and filled with pus, and some of the bodies are hardly recognizable. Dean piles some of the bodies and lights them on fire, but after a while he has to admit to himself that there are just too many and it’s not like there’s a point to it, not with everyone else dead. After a couple of days, the stench is unbelievable, and Dean can’t keep anything down from throwing up so much.

He breaks into a television network building and tries contacting the rest of the country, to see if it’s the same everywhere. No one answers, and after a while, his messages grow more and more desperate as he pleads over the radio whether someone can hear him in Europe. He’s sure he must sound pitiful as he cries over the radio for someone to answer him, _anyone_ , and after a while, he’s just talking aloud so the silence won’t feel so oppressive.

When he finally leaves the city, feeling defeated, Sam is waiting for him with a smirk, and he finally acknowledges that he and his brother are the last living human beings on the planet.

\----

They stick to the countryside for the first couple of months to avoid the smell in the cities. It’s easy enough, driving from farm to farm, getting rid of the couple of bodies in there and staying for a while. Morbidly enough, Sam is almost back to his old self, and he points excitedly at mountains and squirrels and trees as if they were so incredibly exciting. Dean makes the mistake to once point out that there could be a hell of a lot more trees and squirrels if he hadn’t destroyed most of them a while back. Sam lashes out so badly that Dean doesn’t bring it up again, even if it feels like a betrayal to carefully avoid the issue with the same man that had so ruthlessly destroyed everything.

He remembers how it felt to be alone in a city with thousands of dead people, though, and he knows that he would go insane if he had no one else to talk with, evil bastard or not.

Sam talks a lot about their childhood, laughs at that time Bobby caught them smoking outside his house and made them organize all of the books as punishment. For someone that didn’t hesitate to bring on the apocalypse, he sounds awfully fond of those memories, and Dean says so, eyes fixed on the road.

Sam chuckles, shrugs a bit. “Sometimes I hate them, and sometimes I don’t,” he says, and he laughs at Dean’s confused face.

“Just you and me, Dean, just the two of us alone in the world,” Sam sometimes says, looking unnervingly cheerful, and the words sting because Dean had spent half of his life wishing it could be only the two of them again.

\----

The temptation of just shooting Sam once and for all is always there in the back of his mind, but the thought of avenging the human race just sounds hollow when he remembers there’s no one left to avenge. He knows he missed his chance, and that if only he’d had the guts to set everything right from the beginning, the few birds that are left wouldn’t be feeding themselves with the corpses of children.

\----

Sam takes to driving aimlessly around the country like a monarch in the search of his kingdom’s limits. When they see the ocean, it’s still as black as the day Sam poisoned the water, and the stench of rotten fish is nothing compared to the smell in the cities covered in corpses. Lawrence is crawling with demons and Daevas and another thousand nameless creatures that infest the city, and Dean’s not surprised at all to see things climbing up from hell right outside their childhood house.

They spend a long time in the north, too far up in the mountains, and for weeks all Dean can see is snow. He walks behind Sam, his hands shaking in his pockets and his nose turning bright red from the cold. His hair is covered in ice, the same as his clothes, and he can see his breath in the shape of clouds every time he breathes. Sam is only wearing a light jacket, but he doesn’t seem to feel the cold. It scares Dean, the way he hardly seems human anymore.

Sam doesn’t seem to have a purpose anymore, other than to prowl the earth and bask in the destruction he’s caused. Dean follows him around, because there’s nothing at all left to do anymore.

Their lives have always been a giant road trip, and now that the world is dead, and Sam’s sitting in the passenger seat again, it morbidly feels like nothing has changed at all.

\----

As they spend more and more time away from what used to be civilization, they start sleeping in a moth-eaten tent Dean took from the last house they stayed in. It’s not very big, and Dean’s feet always end up freezing cold by the morning. Sam laughs at the way Dean makes a salt circle around the tent before going to sleep, but he doesn’t complain about it, so Dean keeps on doing it. Sam’s breathing by his side lulls him to sleep and the fact that it all feels so normal, so _them_ is eating at his insides.

The sky hasn’t cleared since the day everyone died, and the rumble of the thunder sounds louder and louder as the weeks pass. The clouds are turning more of a rust hue, almost red, and it all looks too biblical for Dean’s tastes. The earth shakes almost daily, little earthquakes that form cracks on the ground’s surface and let out yellow-tinted steam that smells strongly of sulfur. Screams can be heard through the cracks, and it chills Dean to the bone.

Dean survives out of stale seven-eleven packed food and rusty cans of beans. The box of bottled water they always carry around slows the Impala down, but the rest of the water is undrinkable, and Sam doesn’t say anything about it. Sam hardly eats, but he seems to drink in the sight of the destruction around him, in the way demons have taken over cities and have constructed temples with the dead bodies that litter the ground.

The only upside is that there’s nothing left to kill, so Dean doesn’t have to see Sam covered in blood ever again.

(Except in his nightmares).

\----

“The end is near,” Sam says in April, and Dean surprises both Sam and himself by laughing.

“Fuck, but you sound like those crazy people that preach on the streets to clean your soul or suffer eternal torment,” he says, and Sam just looks at him for a minute, face confused, until he starts laughing too.

“Shit, you’re right,” Sam says, still smiling, and it’s almost like having his brother back, the exact intonation and clear eyes. Sam bumps shoulders with him, and Dean bumps back because this is still his little brother, and if he’s already stuck with him through genocide, he’ll stick with him through everything, even if Dean hates himself for it.

So they laugh, and Dean tries to ignore Sam’s words.

\----

Thousands and thousands of ghosts roam the earth now.

The first time that Dean sees a large number of them is in a little town in Nebraska, near where the Roadhouse used to be, and he’s fooled for a minute to think they’re alive when he sees a congregation outside the town’s church, men and women and children, all of them with lit candles between their hands. He runs to them, leaving Sam behind, and it isn’t until he goes through one of them that he realizes what they are.

The girls are all wearing veils covering their hair, and the men are wearing their best suits. All of them are looking at him in silence, eyes sad and expression questioning. They just stand there, flickering occasionally but not doing anything else, with their candles and their sadness, as if they were waiting for something – a miracle, perhaps.

A toddler points at the closed church entrance, and Dean gets the message. As soon as he opens the door they all move as if they were one, and the minute they get inside they vanish, leaving nothing but air behind them.

“I hope you’re happy,” he says in Sam’s general direction once he goes back to the car.

“Oh, but I am,” Sam says, grinning, and Dean hits him in the face. Sam is still smiling as he wipes the blood off his lip with his hand, and it just angers Dean even more. Both of them are covered in bruises when they finally camp that night.

The second time Dean sees so many ghosts together he’s prepared for it, but the burn of seeing other faces is still there, as it is the third and fourth and fifth time he sees something like it. It’s always the same, families and communities, standing together with no discernible purpose. They’re always quiet, and they’re always sad, and to Dean, it looks as if hope has disappeared from the afterlife as well.

\----

It’s May in Arizona when Dean is awoken by the ground shaking beneath him, and he gets out of the old tent to find Sam staring at the sky, face grave. Barely any light filters through the clouds, and it’s almost as dark as nighttime. The earth under Dean’s bare feet feels too hot, and it is as if the planet is burning up from the inside.

“Today’s the day,” Sam says after a while, finally looking at Dean, and Dean doesn’t have to ask what he means. He nods, and goes back inside the tent to look for his shoes.

The earth shakes more and more as the day wears on, and soon all Dean can see is cracks opening as far as the eye can see on the rust-colored desert ground. They form a strangely beautiful pattern, and he can almost hear the planet crumbling to pieces. Sam smiles through it all.

They’re nowhere near a city, but ghosts still walk past them anyway, though in search of what, Dean can’t begin to imagine. Some demons join the procession too, using half-rotten bodies as hosts and dragging themselves forward in a way that reminds Dean of old zombie movies.

Dean takes the bottle of Jack Daniels he had been saving for an emergency out of the trunk, and he and Sam sit on the Impala’s hood, passing the bottle back and forth. It’s oddly relaxing.

“I hate you for this,” Dean says, finally getting the words out after two years of having them stuck on his throat.

“I know,” Sam says simply, looking straight ahead at the strange rock formations that surround them.

“But family first, right?” continues Dean, taking a large swig from the bottle.

Sam smirks. “Knew you’d say that,” he says, and it’s almost like having the old Sam for a moment.

More and more cracks open through the day, and Dean complains that a can of beans makes an awful last meal. Sam says to suck it up, and doesn’t add the part about enjoying the moment that Dean knows he wants to add. The clouds turn a darker red, and if it started raining blood, it wouldn’t surprise Dean in the least. He can hear voices up there, low and distorted, and it mixes with the screams coming up from the cracks in the ground. He really doesn’t want to know what they’re saying.

He lies back on the hood, staring up into the sky because it is still less frightening than the procession of creatures walking steadily in the direction of the dying sun, and he nudges Sam's knee with his own. Sam slaps him in the stomach as a response, and doesn’t say anything at all. He can hear thunder in the distance.

Together, they wait for the end.


End file.
